When it rains reigning male pop superstars, it pours. The boys are back in town, and two of the three or four biggest guys in the recording business, Bruno Mars and Harry Styles, are coincidentally releasing albums on back-to-back weekends, as if teaming up to storm the barricades mostly held in recent years by pop’s girl bosses. So it’s interesting to see what these two alphas are bringing along as stylistic arsenals in their attempts to reassert some dominance, or at least parity. Coming next week is Styles’ intriguingly titled “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally,” and we’ll find out soon enough whether Harry means to use the D-word there literally or just figuratively.
But for Mars’ first solo album in 10 years, “The Romantic,” it is as if disco never happened. It is a time machine back to the mid-1970s, just before dance music took over, with a heavy, heavy emphasis on retro-soul balladry. The album ends with a song called “Dance With Me,” but it’s a song dedicated to slow dancing, just like the surprisingly slow-simmering track that opens the album. When the pace does get upped a couple of times, it’s to bring us up to the tempo of the O’Jays, not to snap us back to the time of J. Cole. There’s not a moment on the whole nine-song collection that sounds like it was minted any more freshly than 1976. It’s already been well-established that the album’s first single (and one of its few bangers), “I Just Might,” reminds folks a little of Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” which came out that year. So, truly, here, Mars is Bicentennial Man.
